Maria Raciti

THE DESIGN FLAW AT THE HEART OF SOCIAL CHANGE

Maria Raciti, Janine Gertz and Sam Raciti

There is a design flaw at the heart of social change. In our editorial, we name it, explain it and show what can be done about it.

The flaw

Most social marketing programs are typically funded for one to three years. Meaningful behaviour change usually takes longer. People need time to notice a problem, try something different and keep doing it. Programs need time to understand participants, work with partners and learn from results.

When funding horizons are shorter than change horizons, three predictable distortions follow.

• Output capture. Highly visible deliverables such as workshops run, people reached and resources distributed become funder-encouraged proxies or signals for behaviour change.
• Outcome drift. Program goals quietly shift toward what can be funded and measured within the contract period.
• Performative evaluation. Measures of success begin to drift towards that needed to secure the next round of funding.

Each of these follows logically from the incentives built into short-term social change funding. The system with an increasing focus on communicating impact rewards visible activity over durable change, and we adapt accordingly.

Projectification: complex change, sliced thin

There is a name for the bigger pattern too. Projectification means turning long-term social change into a string of short projects, each with its own deadline, milestones and reporting cycle. It makes the work easier to manage on paper, but harder to sustain in practice. Staff contracts end just as relationships mature. Audience insight leaves with departing teams. Communities are asked to start again with a new project name and a fresh set of promises.

For social marketing, this matters because participant trust, insight and partnership are part of how successful change happens. When funding stops and starts, those critical mechanisms are weakened.

Elections move the goalposts

Government funding adds a second layer of volatility. When governments change, policy language and priorities change with them. A program can remain vital to the people it serves yet no longer fit the new funding framework. Organisations then spend scarce time reframing their work for the next round. This dynamic plays out in every country where social programs depend on public funds.

What better looks like

Better funding would be designed around change horizons, not just budget and election cycles. That means longer commitments where the problem demands them, staged learning milestones instead of premature outcome claims. It also means funding the infrastructure of authentic impact, such as relationships, local capability building and evaluation that helps programs improve while they are still running.

In such instances, accountability matches how change actually occurs. Sharper measurement and better theories of change matter, but they cannot compensate for funding structures that keep pulling programs back to the start.

Feels familiar? Read more

If this feels familiar, the editorial gives language to a problem many people in social marketing, policy and community work already recognise. It synthesises learnings from collaborative governance, resource dependence, distributive politics and nonprofit resilience scholarship and practice.

The editorial is open access: Raciti, M., Gertz, J. and Raciti, S. (2026), "Navigating short-term funding and government election cycles to achieve sustainable, transformative social impact", Journal of Social Impact in Business Research, Vol. 2 No. 4, pp. 73-82. https://doi.org/10.1108/JSIBR-03-2026-0004